2017 Personalization Development Study Provides Insight into the
Challenges, Benefits and Best Practices of Marketing Personalization

February 15, 2017 09:00 AM Eastern Daylight Time

NEW YORK--(EON: Enhanced Online News)--Monetate,
the worldwide leader in personalization, today announced the
availability of the 2017
Personalization Development Study, its first annual study that
benchmarks the state of personalization by analyzing the real-world
practices of more than 130 senior marketers. The study found that for
those who put in the effort, personalization is not only attainable, but
leads to a number of benefits that positively impact the bottom line.

“It’s no secret that personalization pays off and that it can be
challenging. Organizations that are great at testing and segmentation
need to learn to think differently and build new skills”

Personalization has been proven to increase loyalty, drive higher
conversion rates and grow revenue, but many organizations find that
creating personalized experiences is challenging and instead revert to
less effective segmentation strategies. Personalization, as defined by
this study and in practice at select innovative organizations, goes
beyond segmentation and testing to provide marketers with the ability to
interact with each individual, at any moment, across all touch points,
based on everything known about them.

Monetate compared and contrasted the practices of organizations that
reported exceeding revenue expectations against those that merely met or
altogether missed their revenue goals. Most notably, the data showed
that those that succeeded in personalization saw improvement in
profitability: 95 percent of those that got 3x (or more) return on
investment from their personalization efforts increased profitability
last year (compared to 77 percent and 63 percent of those that got 2x
and 1x, respectively).

The analysis also found that successful organizations have a number of
shared qualities, including:

A documented strategy: 79 percent of organizations that
exceeded revenue goals have a documented personalization strategy,
compared to 31 percent of those that met revenue goals and 8 percent
of those that missed revenue goals.

A dedicated—and growing—budget: those that exceeded revenue
goals have a dedicated budget for personalization 83 percent of the
time. Moreover, 88 percent of that group plan to increase budget for
personalization in 2017, compared to 21 and 33 percent of those that
met or missed revenue goals, respectively.

An integrated approach: with only about half (48 percent) of
organizations that exceeded revenue having a dedicated person
responsible for personalization, the study suggests that the most
successful organizations have made personalization an integrated part
of their operations and charter for all staff, not a siloed project
managed by a single person.

Tools to measure success: 88 percent of those that exceeded
revenue goals have a measurement system in place, compared to
approximately 45 percent of those that met or missed goals.

Application of triggered actions: those that exceeded revenue
goals use personalization and its outputs to fuel triggered emails 78
percent of the time, for ad retargeting 79 percent of the time and for
branded mobile apps 65 percent of the time.

While the study revealed these important key findings, it also
underscored many of the challenges that marketers still face in
deploying successful personalization in their organizations.
Organizational constraints that make it difficult to hold people
accountable for personalization goals and the ability to automate
decisions at scale were the top two challenges cited by respondents.
Monetate’s analysis also uncovered that a continued, heavy reliance on
A/B/N testing is also an issue, with almost 90 percent of organizations
that missed revenue goals still using the practice, in lieu of other
personalization approaches.

“It’s no secret that personalization pays off and that it can be
challenging. Organizations that are great at testing and segmentation
need to learn to think differently and build new skills,” said Lucinda
Duncalfe, CEO of Monetate. “This study shows that and provides a proven
roadmap for success. It is invaluable for everyone developing
personalization programs. At Monetate, we’ve been working on this shift
for years, so we are excited to help our clients usher in the new era in
truly relationship-driven customer interaction that will enhance
business results.”

The complete 2017 Personalization Development Study and its methodology
is available for download on Monetate’s
website.

About MonetateMonetate,
the global leader in personalization software for consumer-facing
brands, enables marketers to create truly individual experiences that
surprise and delight every customer, increasing engagement and improving
performance.

Monetate’s approach to personalization starts with the understanding
that each individual is unique, and instantly chooses the best
interaction for each one. Unlike testing, which identifies the best
choice for everyone, or segmentation, which defines the best choice for
a group of people, Monetate’s 1-to-1 personalization engine reflects the
full diversity of human beings and creates an experience for each one,
in each moment.

In order to deliver true 1-to-1 experiences, Monetate’s platform is:

Independent, so you can use any best of breed solution in your
marketing stack and not be tied to one vendor’s offerings;

Open, so marketers can use all of their data wherever it sits, push a
decision to any touchpoint and pull the results back into their
data/analytics infrastructure;

Real-time, to enable interactions based on a customer’s in-session
behavioral and event data that get their attention in increasingly
narrow buying windows; and

Bionic, giving the creative marketer the power to manage a machine
learning engine and operate at 1-to-1 scale, for real.

Founded in 2008, with offices across the U.S. and Europe, Monetate is
used by leading brands around the world and influences billions of
dollars in revenue every year for The North Face, QVC, J.Crew Group, and
hundreds of other market leaders.

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